Ancestors of Christopher Farr & Elizabeth Gilbert
Roots in Lincolnshire
Anthony Timberland & Dinah Hall
The diagram above shows my direct Lincolnshire ancestors, whose lives were shaped by poverty, loss, and endurance. Their stories are rooted in the damp, fertile earth of Lincolnshire, where people lived close to the seasons and to the success or failure of the harvest.
The earliest ancestors I can trace with reasonable confidence are Anthony Timberland and Dinah Hall, my sixth great‑grandparents. They married at St Andrew’s Church, Folkingham, on 14 July 1733. The parish register gives us no parents, no ages, and no clues to their origins, so their beginnings remain uncertain. One possibility is that Anthony was the Anthony Timberland baptised at Helpringham in 1679, but that identification remains unproven and should be treated as a working theory rather than established fact.
I am fairly confident they are my 6th great-grandparents, as a witnesses to their daughter’s wedding, (my 5th great-grandmother Ann Timberland) was a Thomas Hall - likely a relation of her mother Dinah Hall.
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| St Andrews Church, Folkingham. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkingham |
It is also possible that Anthony had been married before. Parish records show an Anthony and Anne Timberland baptising children in the parish prior to his marriage to Dinah. This means either there was another Anthony living locally at the same time, or he had a previous wife who died. That uncertainty matters, because it reminds us how fragile these family lines can be in the records: one burial, one remarriage, one missing page in the register, and an entire household can slip into doubt. If these earlier baptisms do belong to him, then he and Anne had at least three children—two daughters named Ann who died in infancy, and a son, also named Anthony, who appears to have survived.
The earliest secure point in the line is their daughter Ann, my fifth great‑grandmother, born in Folkingham in 1734. Her childhood was marked by repeated loss. Her father died when she was only two, and her mother, Dinah, remarried in November 1738 to a man named John Morris. A daughter, Elizabeth, followed in September 1739. But tragedy struck again: John Morris died in May 1742, and when Ann was fourteen her mother also passed away, leaving at least two—possibly three—children orphaned. In a world where survival depended on labour, kinship, and the goodwill of neighbours, such a loss would have been devastating. A girl in Ann’s position would almost certainly have had to enter service or other paid work early, and her later life suggests that she eventually found her way to Minting, where she married John Farr in 1766.
Folkingham and it’s market past
Folkingham was once far more than the quiet Lincolnshire village it appears today. For centuries it had been a small but significant market town, first a borough and later a local centre whose weekly markets and seven annual fairs drew people from the surrounding farms and hamlets. The market place formed the town’s working heart: livestock, grain, poultry, and household goods changed hands there, and the seasonal rhythms of the countryside were translated into trade.
Its position on the road from London to Lincoln helped shape that life. Folkingham served not only its own farming community but also carriers, traders, and later the coaching traffic that passed through the district. In its market era, it was a place of movement and exchange as well as worship and administration, and that earlier vitality still lingers in the scale of the street pattern and the solid buildings around the market square.
By the later eighteenth century the town entered a new phase under the Heathcote family, who purchased the manor in 1788 and reshaped the centre in a Georgian style. The Greyhound Inn was remodelled as part of this revival, helping Folkingham adapt to the coaching trade and giving the town much of its present appearance. Even so, this was a revival rather than a return to former prominence. The coming of the railway bypassed the town, and Folkingham gradually lost the busier role it had once played.
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| Rear of Greyhound Inn, Folkingham Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkingham |
A town of the Fen edge
Folkingham’s setting helps explain both its strengths and its limits. It stood on higher, drier ground just above the Fen edge—safe from the worst flooding of the lower fenlands, yet still deeply tied to an agricultural landscape. Its fortunes rose and fell with farming, trade, and transport, and ordinary families lived in a world shaped by seasonal work, parish support, and the uncertainties of rural life. St Andrew’s Church, standing on the same site since the twelfth century, anchored the community through centuries of change.
For the families who lived there in the eighteenth century, Folkingham was not a picturesque relic but a working community, where life was closely bound to land and labour.
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| Folkingham, Lincolnshire Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkingham |
What life was like
For most families, the parish register is the only surviving trace, but the wider history helps us imagine the world they inhabited. St Andrew’s, largely rebuilt in the fourteenth century, was the centre of worship, gathering, and parish administration.
Yet Folkingham also had a harder side. The town became associated with correction and discipline as well as trade and religion, and its later prison and house of correction show how closely the parish was tied to systems of law, poor relief, and social control. This mattered to families like the Timberlands, whose lives were shaped by the realities of poverty, the parish poor system, and the constant vulnerability of children, widows, and labourers.
By Ann’s lifetime, rural Lincolnshire was beginning to feel the early pressures of agricultural change. Enclosure, shifting labour patterns, and improving farming practices did not transform every parish at once, but they slowly altered how people worked the land and how securely they could live from it. For a family like this one, such changes were felt less as progress than as uncertainty.
The next story will examine Ann’s life with John Farr in Minting, Lincolnshire, and the world they built together in the decades that followed.
Sources
- Folkingham - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkingham
- Folkingham History: HOME https://www.folkingham.com
- Heathcote's Town | Folkingham https://www.folkingham.com/heathcote-s-town
- Regency Prosperity https://www.folkingham.com/regency-prosperity
- St Andrew's Church - Folkingham Parish Council https://folkingham.parish.lincolnshire.gov.uk/parish-information/st-andrews-church
- House of Correction - Folkingham Parish Council https://folkingham.parish.lincolnshire.gov.uk/parish-information/house-correction
- House of Correction – Folkingham Parish Council https://folkingham.parish.lincolnshire.gov.uk/parish-information/house-correction/1
- Farms and Farming - Forncett History https://www.forncetthistory.net/farms-and-farming/ Folkingham, a forgotten town, now a village, lying isolated in the ... https://www.facebook.com/groups/143520235831162/posts/2635867979929696/
- [PDF] past present - Society for Lincolnshire History & Archaeology https://slha.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/import/Downloads/LPP022.pdf
- An Extra Dimension? Lincolnshire Farm Buildings as Historical ... https://www.jstor.org/stable/40275192
- Folkingham with Laughton, Lincolnshire, England Genealogy https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Folkingham_with_Laughton,_Lincolnshire,_England_Genealogy
- REFORMATION - Folkingham History https://www.folkingham.com/reformation
- Reimagining Lincolnshire – Discovering and sharing untold stories https://reimagininglincs.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk
- Folkingham Genealogy Resources & Parish Registers - Forebears https://forebears.io/england/lincolnshire/folkingham
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